Shutdown crisis rooted in GOP’s budget

To understand the shutdown crisis in Washington, go back to the House Republican balanced budget plan last spring.

To placate the right, promises were made then that could not be kept, and with a new fiscal year beginning Tuesday, GOP leaders are running out of room. President Barack Obama may very well be in denial about the federal debt, as Republicans suggest. But Speaker John Boehner and his deputies have a credibility deficit of their own.

Back in March, that resolution held out the promise of repealing Obamacare but got to balance only by keeping hundreds of billions in added revenues and Medicare savings in the Affordable Care Act. It promised to protect defense spending while living with the post-sequestration caps of $967 billion set in the 2011 Budget Control Act. But to deliver on this pledge, it required such large cuts from domestic spending bills that the whole appropriations process collapsed by midsummer.

A popular $44.1 billion transportation and housing bill had to be pulled from the House floor in late July. Of the eight annual appropriations bills that are mostly nondefense spending, none made it through the House this year.

The logical place for the Obamacare fight now should have been the appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services this past summer. But that bill was never even marked up in the House because of the level of domestic cuts demanded in March.

Instead, the fight is now on a CR that sets annual funding at $986.7 billion — or about $20 billion above what the GOP proposed for fiscal 2014. Why? Because if the CR were strictly matched the post-sequester allocation of funds under the BCA for 2014, the Pentagon would have to cut roughly $44 billion from the $512.5 billion level approved by the House in late July.

That’s an immense drop many Republicans would find hard to accept even on a two- to three-month basis. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages have been tearing into old conservative allies for ignoring the CR’s higher spending. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voted with Democrats for a blanket waiver on all budget points of order against the CR on Friday — in part because he feared the risk to defense.

McConnell’s fellow Kentucky Republican, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, spelled it out best in a candid moment during the July debate on the House’s Pentagon budget.

“Some will complain that the bill breaks the cap placed on defense spending under the sequester level for fiscal 2014 put into place by the Budget Control Act,” Rogers said. “To this I say, ‘Of course it does.’”

“If nothing is done to cancel the next round of sequestration cuts that are scheduled to take effect when this Congress adjourns, this bill would be cut to a total of $468 billion.”

He is too smart not to have seen the holes in his budget plan. And once the Senate followed with its own resolution, he failed to follow up by aggressively pursuing a conference with Democrats.

The lure was always to push Obama back against a debt ceiling backstop. But the sort of entitlement reforms and long-term savings that Republicans want are far better dealt with in a budget reconciliation bill. Now, after blocking the Senate from going to conference, the GOP is left with two time-sensitive vehicles — a CR and a debt ceiling bill — to try to effect change.

“We bitched and moaned about the Senate not doing a budget. Then they did, and we didn’t go to conference,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) told POLITICO off the House floor Saturday. “You need a big plan, Democrats and Republicans in the same room. We should have gone to conference.”

Boehner joked Saturday of being the “happy warrior,” but the Ohio Republican has paid a heavy price.

He is a proven legislator, a former House committee chairman, and there’s no evidence that anyone else in the current leadership could do a better job with the divisions in his conference.